Gab was founded in August, following the high-profile banning of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter.
Photograph: Screengrab

Scroll down the “popular” posts on Gab, the social network whose logo is not a blue bird, but a Pepe frog, and you’ll get a different take on the election.

The service was founded in August, following the high-profile banning of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter for harassment. Looking like a cleanly designed hybrid of Twitter and Reddit, it allows users to post updates without character limits, with memes, links and gifs. It appears to have had an influx of users in recent days.

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Those who have been able to get in – reportedly the service currently has tens of thousands of people on its waiting list – will see that many of the most read and upvoted content comes from alt-right accounts that have long since been bounced from Twitter. As a result, spending time on Gab feels like hanging out with exiled ghosts.

Self-described “free speech activist” and alt-right influencer @ricky_vaughn99 was kicked off Twitter weeks back. A series of attempted resurrections with alternative accounts also failed. But he is alive and well on Gab.

He got lots of upvotes when he gabbed:

Clickbait failed to get The Cunt elected. George Soros and other billionaires will cut funding for clickbait. Big journalistic layoffs are on the way!”

The service has had a boost in the last few days. That appears to have a direct relationship to the fact that since the election, Twitter has applied the ban-hammer to a number of prominent alt-right accounts.

At the Atlantic yesterday, conservative commentator David Frum wrote that this was a bad idea. He pointed out that there was no evidence of harassment from at least some of the banned accounts, and argued that “the right way to deal with social media’s neo-Nazis is not by taking away their platforms, but by taking away their audiences”.

There’s something compelling about that argument when one logs into Gab. What use are bans in an era when the alt-right can go ahead and create, or adopt, their own platforms?

The trending topics indicating a strong presence from that camp: #MAGA (Make America Great Again), #PresidentTrump and #AltRight. If you burrow into them you’ll see the same memes, IQ charts and pseudo-scientific maps of racial attributes that alt-right accounts still spread on Twitter.

Gab founder and CEO of the service, Andrew Torba, insisted in a “gab” that “we welcome everyone and always will”. But so far, you need to look pretty hard to find accounts not posting a pro-Trump line.

Torba also says that it is not “Twitter for racists”. But there is no shortage of racially charged material to be found there.

Under the #SpeakFreely topic this morning, an account called European Americans posted:

Mexico owes USA untold $TRILLIONS for negatively impacting our socioeconomic health. How will they pay? Take the land, President Trump.”

Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’s offsider at Infowars, appeared to acknowledge the political homogeneity of the site when he gabbed:

Now that Twitter is purging everyone, I think it’s important for Gab to branch out and attract leftists so we’re not just preaching to the choir.”

A favored topic in recent days is the alleged censoriousness of Twitter, combined with the hope that Gab will provide a new sanctuary for an ideology that Twitter appears to be moving against. (The Guardian contacted Twitter to confirm whether there was a push against alt-right accounts, but they did not respond before deadline).

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The man who coined the term “alt-right” to describe his own ideology, Richard Spencer, had his personal account suspended from Twitter on Tuesday, along with that of his far-right thinktank, the National Policy Institute.

He joined Gab a month ago, but has begun posting regularly in the last 48 hours.

One of his posts yesterday read:

My impression of Gab is that it’s a better platform than Twitter (in terms of software). Obviously, the big issue is the ‘network effect,’ so we’ll see what happens. I’m hopeful.”

As of last night, he was listed as one of 10 “who to follow” accounts on Gab’s “popular” page, along with other alt-right luminaries – like longstanding rightwing noise machine Ann Coulter, and Paul Joseph Watson.

Another in that list was fellow Twitter exile Pax Dickinson, who you may remember as the man who was forced to resign as Business Insider’s CTO over a series of misogynist tweets.

He has since emerged as CTO of WeSearchr, a company he founded with notorious rightwing journalist Chuck C Johnson, which crowdsources bounties for tabloid exposés on progressives, moderate conservatives and media figures.

Yesterday, he was talking about his Twitter ban as a kind of victory.

The great purge is upon us. But Twitter could have purged the #AltRight BEFORE we memed a President into the White House. They didn’t because they never believed it was possible.”

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On Thursday, he doubled down on the triumphalism.

The left wing has asserted full control of Twitter now, so the right wing will just have to make do with #Gab, #WeSearchr, Breitbart, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House. #MAGA”

Meanwhile Torba is ecstatic. Like Dickinson, he’s a pro-Trump Silicon Valley identity whose views and behavior have put him offside with some big players.

Before Gab, he founded a social media ad automator. But just last week, he was banned from startup incubator Y Combinator after the organization alleged that he spoke in “a threatening, harassing way” to other members on Facebook in a succession of discussions where he supported Trump.

But on Gab this Tuesday, he was celebrating the service’s newfound success: “Today has been Gab’s biggest day yet. Time to upgrade our hosting. :)”

It may be that Gab becomes an online sanctuary for the far right. It’s not clear whether anyone else will join the party. The question then will be: will isolation in such a bubble simply intensify and normalize alt-right views?